Web Authoring Statistics: Page headers

The <html> element

The most-used attribute on html elements is
xmlns, from
misguided people
using XHTML but sending it as text/html. They even
(just) outnumber the people who specify the lang attribute!

A whole slew of people are specifying the xml:lang
attribute, which will have absolutely no effect (no HTML processor
will look at that attribute; it's an XML attribute). And finally,
the fourth most-used attribute on the html element is
the dir attribute (used by people who write in
languages written right-to-left to make the text render in the
right way).

All the other attributes used on html are
invalid. Most (all?) of the xmlns:foo
attributes are artefacts of Microsoft Office's creative "HTML"
output, and the id attribute — not legal on the
html element in HTML4! — was used by people to
allow user stylesheets to target their sites. (This is now
redundant since newer Web browsers give users that kind of control
themselves.)

The <head> element

The head element is the most popular,
apparently. Do people specify any attributes on it?

profile.

Short answer: not very often! It turns out that a tiny but
measurable number of people do use the profile
attribute, though. The three most-often used values are
http://gmpg.org/xfn/1,
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/, and
http://gmpg.org/xfn/11. This makes XFN the most popular HTML metadata
profile!

The other values of profile we found in the sample
data were all below the threshold of significance, but for some
reason a large number of sites seem to have one or two pages with
profile attributes that point at themselves.

The <title> element

The title element is pretty boring:

lang.

Only one attribute is used on the title element
often enough to appear on the radar, and that's the quite
legitimate lang attribute.

We can't even really say anything about bad markup; the
title element is the one element that is absolutely
required on every HTML page, and indeed, it seems the overwhelming
majority of pages specify it.